[ILUG] Sun and the sunray thingy

[Fergal Daly]

It sounds like VNC ( http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ ) which I think
puts a fake xserver between the app and the x server that is really
displaying the app. This fake x server is never shut down so it remembers
where everything was,

Fergal


At 14:37 13/10/99 +0100, Caolan McNamara wrote:
>I was up at Sun yesterday and had a gawk at their sunray thingy, very nice I 
>have to say. One big server elsewhere and each local machine is just a
monitor
>and a sunray box, no local harddrives or fan or moving parts, so completely
>silent. about 10x10 inches and 2 deep. Couple of usb ports hanging out of
the 
>back of the box, monitor keyboard and power cables, all resources are
remote. 
>Each users gets a card and they can use that to bypassing logging in and
out, 
>stick in the card and "twap" up comes your session exactly as it was when
you 
>pulled out the card, pull out the card and wander over to another machine
and 
>stick it in, and again"twap" up it comes. Very sweet. 
>
>I originally thought that the card was just sending a session close
downrequest
>to all the apps, and that they were saving their state, you know the thing
you
>can do with gnome and kde and other apps which save their location on screen,
>and optionally save their state so that they can start up again and put 
>themselves in as close a state as they were when they were shut down, but on
>closer examination this wasnt the case at all, i got suspicious when I noted
>that an ordinary spread of apps were managing to remember their entire state,
>down to what menu entry you highlighted, etc etc. In fact the session
remains 
>running all the time (if you just put in and pull out the card), so for
instance
>if you have netscape downloading a file, twap the card out and come back 
>tomorrow, stick in the card into a completely different machine if you so
>desire, and ta-da the session has remained open for the duration and
netscape 
>is still running. Very cool. 
>
>There was a catch though, each server machine hosts about 20-30 clients, and
>if you twap your card into a client attached to a different server then you
>dont get the original desktop which is running happily away on the first
server,
>and utterly disconnected from the second server.
>
>What I'd like to figure out is what trick is sun doing here, does each user
>get a virtual XServer on the main server (xvfb sort of thing), which is 
>then piped down to the sunray which sticks it onto the monitor. Or is there
>some magic trick where all the X apps are reparented from one display (the
>virtual one) to another (the sunray one). Like what the hell ? Anyone in Sun
>gonna let me in on the mechanics here, maybe its a lot easier than ive been
>thinking.
>
>Anyways I thought it was pretty cool, Id also like to know what sort of stuff
>is actually inside the sunray box, some standard sparc processor ? etc etc,
>could linux every run on such equipment etc, or is the box basically dumb
which
>is what I imagine. Who controls any usb devices that get plugged into the
box ?
>and so on...
>
>C.
>
>Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
>Work: Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-86-8790257
>URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique strategy
>Don't be frightened of cliches
>
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